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This FREE podcast will teach YOU how to launch and grow YOUR startup, especially through the fast-paced world of rewards-based crowdfunding!

Your instructors, Zach Smith and Thomas Alvord, are world-renowned business experts with proven hands-on experience in sales, video production, page design, advertisements, public relations, e-commerce, business strategy, consulting, and more—and they will teach YOU valuable wisdom that you can use to take YOUR business to the next level! Since mid-2014, these serial entrepreneurs have partnered with 2,663+ campaigns on Kickstarter and/or Indiegogo, helped 872+ of those projects to raise $226,162,634+ altogether, and (in doing so) led their own startup Funded Today to rank as America’s 27th fastest-growing company in 2018. So, don’t wait until tomorrow—get funded TODAY!!! Your tuition is already paid, and class is already in session, so please subscribe NOW to start learning from the world’s most successful crowdfunding experts…

What does it take to manage customer service? Why is customer service more important now than ever before? And finally, what are the best ways to ensure that you, too, can provide world-class customer service? Let’s dive right in…

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. It’s hard to maintain superiority in products/services indefinitely and, whenever your competitors offer comparable benefits-and-costs, customers will rely upon other factors to make purchasing decisions, such as how well they know and like and trust you, plus how well you treat them.

2. Customer service is vital in encouraging customer loyalty, along with positive reviews, which are the most powerful form of marketing—and customer-centered businesses tend to thrive.

3. Service starts with actively nurturing love for our neighbors as ourselves, which naturally leads us to act in accordance with the Golden Rule by seeking mutually-beneficial business relationships, and it also starts with us and then works outward through our organizational structure.

4. Customer service is mostly an operations job not a sales job (although it may benefit from some salesmanship), and it should remain part of everyone’s job even if dedicated specialists are hired to oversee it.

In this episode, we’re waxing philosophical once more. The topic: FREEDOM. The reason: we think that it’s the most important word in the world to focus on. And today, we’ll show you why...

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. Bondage is sometimes entirely self-imposed, but we can discipline ourselves to escape this sort.

2. We should each value freedom, which allows us to achieve our greatest potential for happiness, although such results will differ from person to person in their details.

3. We should each freely choose to clarify the details of the sort of life that we ultimately want to live, devise a specific plan to achieve it, and start immediately to follow that plan.

4. We can freely choose activities that will enable ourselves to become freer in spending our time and/or money without health constraints, and also in enjoying feeling inner peace without either guilt or regret, and to maintain proper harmony between all such aspects of our lives.

5. Gaining freedom in one respect may require sacrificing some freedom in other respects, and not all sacrifices are worthwhile, so we shouldn’t sacrifice recklessly.

In this episode, we’re circling back around to our extremely popular “Life After Crowdfunding” series with perhaps our most practical episode in the series so far, which is about how to turn your website into a cash machine. Let’s dive right in!

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. Entrepreneurs should reject “entremyopia” to embrace realistic expectations, including that all startups will face challenges, but that greater challenges can potentially precede greater rewards.

2. It’s good to offer your product/service on your website, but it’s better to enhance that website with effective analytics code, optimized sales media that emphasizes your unique selling proposition (USP) to maximize your website’s conversion rate (which is typically 1%-4%), and both SEO and persuasive marketing (which will be harder to do profitably for cheaper items) through ads, e-mail, affiliates, et cetera, to help draw paying traffic to itself.

3. Collecting customers’ e-mailing addresses and then remarketing to them via e-mail can help you to build a beneficial long-term business relationship with them while obtaining additional sales from them at low cost, all of which can maximize their lifetime revenue to your business.

4. Your initial business goal should be to achieve profitability through a breakeven CPA at minimum, which will be worse than it was on Kickstarter and may require you to spend capital at-a-loss for a while to build a sizable-enough customer base—and you should wait until your business is more mature before starting to develop its branding, which yields results that are harder to quantify.

In this episode, we have a wonderful guest—Greg Mercer, who is the founder of Jungle Scout. We’re going to discuss how tools like Jungle Scout can give you an edge over your competition on Amazon.

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. Pursue your passions for work, as long as you can earn a living from them—and, after you’ve achieved financial stability, you can focus more on working for fun than for profit.

2. Entrepreneurship requires persistence despite failure, and benefits from a mentality of both abundance and generosity.

3. Amazon is poised to continue leading its industry for the foreseeable future, and has increasingly favored third-party sellers.

4. Jungle Scout aids Amazon sellers with tools like referrals to experts, comparisons of how well specific products are selling, intelligence on foreign manufacturers, and research about listing keywords.

5. Offering new products is the best way to keep your Amazon business growing, as optimizing Amazon listings boosts sales but also yields diminishing returns.

In this episode, we are continuing our “Life After Crowdfunding” series by discussing how to make big money on Amazon by optimizing your listings. Let’s jump right in…

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. Amazon listing titles should include the brand, the model, its attributes, and its benefits, while incorporating appropriate keywords for SEO determined through research.

2. Amazon listing bullet-points should each introduce a single concept in ALL CAPS and then detail that concept in a paragraph that both sells and aids SEO, providing information that’s thorough enough that potential customers don’t need to look elsewhere for it.

3. Amazon sellers should register for a U. S. trademark so that they can register their brand with Amazon, which will enable them to control how distributors present their product, and also to enhance their own listing with branded content.

4. Amazon listings should incorporate “enhanced branded content,” which should typically include a main high-resolution “hero” image on a white background, plus seven additional images showing its size and/or usage (including “lifestyle” shots), along with a pitch video.

6. Amazon listings should generally render it as easy as possible for customers to buy.

7. In optimizing your Amazon listing, you should focus firstly on maximizing its conversion rates so that it sells as effectively as possible, secondly on maximizing its SEO to attract “organic” traffic as effectively as possible, and thirdly on perfecting your marketing (which we may present in a future episode) to attract referral traffic as effectively as possible.

In this episode, we are bringing you Zach’s special interview by Carson Jorgensen in his pretty-famous podcast “The Definition of Success.” Carson and Zach discuss quite a few things that are a little bit different than what we normally talk about in our podcast—they talk about business, life, happiness, and (probably most importantly) the whole idea of self-awareness. Let’s get started…

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. We should develop self-awareness about who we are, what we can already do well, what we need to improve, and what we want to become, all of which will facilitate both our success and our happiness.

2. Self-awareness is aided by feedback from others; we should humbly accept such feedback to the extent that it helps us to progress, but also refrain from worrying excessively about what others think about us such that it impedes our progress.

3. We should focus our attention NOT on what we either can’t or shouldn’t control, but on what we can control, learning to control it well, which will facilitate our freedom in various respects, along with our happiness.

4. We should genuinely be ourselves, but also persistently strive to become our best selves.

5. We should focus not on tearing ourselves down but on building ourselves up in all of the various aspects of our lives, which involves maintaining our motivation while focusing persistently upon improving one important thing at a time, measuring our progress until we’ve mastered it.

6. We should maintain a connection with our past selves, maintain empathy for other people, seek mutually-beneficial relationships with them, and remember that freely doing nice things for them might encourage them to do likewise for us.

7. We should evaluate our potential business partners very carefully, and wisely delegate business responsibilities to specialists.

In this episode, we’re bringing back our very popular series “Life After Crowdfunding.” And today’s topic of Amazon is one of our favorites—it’s the 800-pound gorilla of e-commerce that you cannot ignore. Let’s dive right in!

2. Amazon provides a wealth of readily-available intelligence that can help entrepreneurs to gauge how much demand exists for a product, how well (or poorly) those demands are already being supplied by competitors, how intense and/or mature such competition is, and what prices they need to either match or beat, all of which may help them to avoid wasting their resources on developing products that people don’t want.

1. We can live more happily by gleaning time-tested truths from great philosophers, including the Stoics, whose beliefs about pursuing happiness through virtue originated in ancient Greece, thrived in classical Rome, and continue to attract some modern adherents worldwide.

2. We should nurture gratitude for what we already have (whether time or things), and cheerfully use it well, while actively curbing our potentially-limitless desires for more, lest we allow our avarice to spiral out-of-control.

3. We should not worry obsessively about what we cannot control (like our past or our reputation or our mortality), but humbly accept it while instead focusing our attention on what we can control (like our present or our character or our time-usage).

4. Our thoughts help shape our outcomes, and our decisions determine our destiny; we should not mindlessly react to our circumstances as they arise but instead proactively “seize the day,” “live in the moment,” question our desires to reject any unworthy ones, focus our attention not on our difficulties but on the opportunities that accompany them, exercise our imagination to rehearse success rather than failure, and plan our future (including by preparing for misfortunes).

5. We generally know what we ought to do but we sometimes procrastinate committing ourselves to it fully; instead, we should immediately demand the best of ourselves and then exert our willpower and minds to become our best selves, which may require sacrifice.

In this episode, we’re talking about one of Zach’s most favorite things: the #1 reason why your life “sucks” right now—and what you can do about it! Let’s get started…

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⭐ During this episode, we detail these takeaways:

1. Reality is objective, but perspective is subjective and may depend upon our frame-of-reference, and so our reference-points influence our perceptions, which influence our happiness.

2. Many qualities like wealth or achievement are relative across time-and-space.

3. Whenever we evaluate ourselves or evaluate others or compare ourselves with others, we should remember that each individual characteristic is merely a tiny part of a complex whole, that each of us usually succeeds better in some ways than in others, and that we don’t normally perceive the entire truth about anyone.

4. “The grass is always greener where it’s watered,” so we should strive to nurture good desires and thoughts, acknowledge opportunity and find hope in it, and persistently learn-and-improve toward our potential, while remembering that some successes may require substantial sacrifices.

5. Whenever we obtain unnecessary material possessions that we want, we then “need” to spend more on maintenance, we tend to grow accustomed to them and may even take them for granted, we may easily want more, and such desires can potentially spiral out-of-control unless we actively curb them while nurturing gratitude instead—but genuine happiness is found not in stuff but in intangible things like self-improvement and experience and service, which reminds us that we’re not the only people with problems.

You might find this episode’s topic a bit interesting: “Life After Crowdfunding: IndieGoGo InDemand – What Do I Do After I’ve Had a Successful Campaign on Kickstarter?” An interesting question! Your journey has just begun. Don’t worry, though—we’ll get it all covered in this episode…

2. It’s best to prepare your Indiegogo InDemand page to debut immediately when your Kickstarter campaign ends, and to redirect traffic from your Kickstarter page through a “Spotlight” button to your Indiegogo page, so that you don’t needlessly lose either momentum or pledges.

3. It helps to market your Kickstarter campaign through short URLs with adjustable forwarding that can be updated anytime your project transitions from one platform to another.

4. While campaigning on Indiegogo, you should use “secret perks,” negotiate Indiegogo newsletter appearances, and possibly leverage your success to obtain additional funds from angel investors and/or venture capitalists, including on “Shark Tank,” which can also be good for publicity.

5. You can end your Indiegogo InDemand campaign anytime (and even resume it anytime) until your Kickstarter project is fulfilled, but you shouldn’t expect your InDemand campaign to raise more than a fraction of what your Kickstarter campaign raised.